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{"id":193,"date":"2011-12-17T00:27:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-17T00:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2011\/12\/193\/"},"modified":"2011-12-17T00:27:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-17T00:27:00","slug":"193","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2011\/12\/193.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

THEY\u2019VE GOT THE FINEST HOME MOVIES THAT YOU HAVE EVER SEEN<\/a><\/span>: Did you know that Less Than Zero<\/span> is a Christmas movie? It\u2019s festive and totally appropriate!<\/p>\n

No, it\u2019s actually a 1987 adaptation of a Bret Ellis novel; Robert Downey Jr. plays a downward-spiraling coke addict, which was, let\u2019s say, a triumph of method acting. It\u2019s set in LA, it opens with this song<\/a>, it\u2019s glossy and Swatch-colored from start to finish, its dialogue is on-the-nose (\u201cDid you girls know that you have television sets between your legs?\u201d), and all the players deliver their lines in a kind of actressy drunken rant. I get why people might watch this for camp value. But I loved it pretty unreservedly and found it genuinely painful to watch. Downey is terrific, and Jamie Gertz and Andrew McCarthy (I know!) worked really well because<\/span> they always sounded fake\u2013they sounded like people who weren\u2019t sure how to say the things they had to say. The movie hits very hard on something David Carr also writes really powerfully about in The Night of the Gun<\/span>: When you\u2019ve broken a sufficient number of promises, to yourself or to others, there\u2019s no way to speak words that can be trusted, and the attempt to do so only makes you more painfully aware of your own untrustworthiness. <\/p>\n

The ending is OTT in a way I didn\u2019t care for (eta: it\u2019s really AfterSchool Special-ish), but whatever, I\u2019m not trying to defend this movie to you. I\u2019m trying to say that I got a lot from what it was doing.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"